Experimental study of dry reforming of biogas in a tubular anode-supported solid oxide fuel cell

The performance of a tubular Ni/YSZ anode supported SOFC directly fed by an anaerobic digestion simulated biogas, with an extra addition of carbon dioxide to operate in conservative operating conditions to avoid coking on the anode support, was investigated. The fuel cell has been tested at a fixed oven temperature of 800 °C and under biogas/CO2 mixtures with different volumetric ratios, fuel utilization (FU) and current densities. Polarization curves and performance maps were obtained to better understand the influence of the investigated operational parameters on the cell behavior. Furthermore, since the tubular geometry enables an easy separation of the anode and cathode exhaust gases, the anode off-gas has been collected and monitored through a gas-chromatograph under open circuit voltage to investigate on the catalytic behavior of a Ni-based state-of-the-art anode. For corresponding operative conditions, performances of the cell for biogas/CO2 1/1.5 (i.e. CH4/CO2 30/70) and 1/2 (i.e. CH4/CO2 24/76) were at least 2% and 4% lower than the case 1/1 (i.e. CH4/CO2 20/80), respectively. The highest efficiency of 43.4% was reached at 17.5 A and FU = 70%.